Rallies Augur Brief Reign For Milosevic

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — More quickly than the political opponents of Slobodan Milosevic had dared hope, grass-roots dissatisfaction with the Yugoslav president is surfacing across much of Serbia.

Hostility toward Milosevic, bubbling up this week on the streets of the most unlikely of towns, has raised expectations among opposition politicians that Milosevic's survival in power may now be measured not in years, but in months.

What has particularly raised eyebrows among political analysts, who are beginning to doubt whether opposition parties can keep up with grass-roots anger, is the surprise eruption of large and violent protests in the large southern Serbian city of Leskovac, a longtime stronghold of the Milosevic regime.

There, without the help of any political party, but with the active involvement of army reservists who fought in Kosovo, more than 20,000 people marched on Monday night calling for Milosevic to resign. On Tuesday, about 2,000 people charged the local police station, demanding the release of the local television technician who had organized Monday's rally.

Police responded with tear gas and by beating demonstrators with nightsticks. Demonstrators retreated and later attacked the home of a local political boss who belongs to the Yugoslav Left, a hard-line communist party headed by Milosevic's wife. They smashed windows in the house and destroyed its front gate, a police official said.

"If Milosevic is in trouble in Leskovac, then he is really in trouble," said Aleksa Djilas, a historian and political analyst in Belgrade who is not affiliated with the opposition groups trying to force the Yugoslav leader from office. "It is like a Kennedy being in trouble in Boston. This is the beginning of the end. I don't know when the end will happen, but it will be months, not years."

The involvement of Yugoslav army reservists in demonstrations in Leskovac is a wild-card element that, if repeated in towns and cities across Serbia, could tip the scales against Milosevic much more quickly than opposition leaders had expected. Since the end of the Kosovo war in early June, hundreds of reservists have intermittently blocked roads and bridges in central and southern Serbia, demanding pay for their service during the 11-week war.

The survival skills of Milosevic, who has been indicted on war crimes charges, should not be underestimated. Although he has lost four wars this decade while presiding over the implosion of the economy, he remains a shrewd politician. He has weathered eruptions of mass unhappiness in Serbia before.

As they have been for years, opposition leaders in Serbia are divided about how best to plug into popular discontent, which is rooted both in anger about the lost war in Kosovo and fear of the collapsing economy.

The Serbian Renewal Movement, led by the charismatic Vuk Draskovic, had insisted since the war in Kosovo ended that the time was not right for street demonstrations. Draskovic, as recently as Monday, said he is a "legalist" who wants to press for reform from within the system.

The stunning news from Leskovac, which is controlled by Milosevic's Socialists but where the Serbian Renewal Movement is the main opposition group, appears to have forced the hand of Draskovic. His party announced on Wednesday that it would take charge of a rally in Leskovac tonight.

Milan Bozic, deputy mayor of Belgrade and a top leader in the Serbian Renewal Movement, said all political parties in Serbia have underestimated both the depth of anti-Milosevic feeling and its power to bring people to the streets.

"All of sudden, it looks as though frustration over Milosevic is much more deeply embedded into the national consciousness than we expected," Bozic said.

Djindjic, a key leader of the Alliance for Change and a rival of Draskovic, delivered a rousing, if vague, speech on Tuesday that envisioned simultaneous daily rallies in towns across the country, as well as a general strike.

Djindjic said he expected that the Serbian Orthodox Church, which last month demanded that Milosevic resign and which has since been bitterly condemned on state television, would soon join the opposition and call Serbs out on the nationwide general strike.

The Milosevic regime appears to fear the involvement of the church in politics. Politika, its main newspaper, on Wednesday published an angry commentary that condemned church leaders for making peace in Kosovo with "terrorist" Albanian leaders and warned the church to avoid the "murky waters" of politics.